


Red Ledger

by Askellie (NadaNine)



Series: SLAUE [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Eye Trauma, Gore, Other, Sadism, Underage Sadist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 03:36:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15161708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NadaNine/pseuds/Askellie
Summary: “And it gets easier every time I do it, but the need doesn’t go away. Not for long,” Chara says, the words almost like a sigh; like it costs them something to say it even as they drive their fingers deeper into Papyrus’s eye-socket.It's time to have some real talk about Chara's violent hobbies. Set early in the Slaue timeline, before they start collecting their skeleton harem.





	Red Ledger

**Author's Note:**

> Although I’ve talked a bit about Slaue’s early days in various asks, I haven’t written much from that era of the story. This segment centres around the early days of Chara and Papyrus’s dealings, not to long after Chara takes control of the Dreemurr household. Chara’s about 14 here. Paps would be the monster equivalent of being in his late teens. This is how Chara started on their dubious road towards collecting a skeleton harem (which turned out to be a much less dangerous hobby than their previous one).

Skeletons don’t need to breathe. Papyrus tries to remind himself of this as he gasps unevenly, air catching in his throat like he’s about to heave up something more tangible. The corridor around him is tilting in an alarming fashion, so he’s quick to set his back against the door he just exited and ease down until he’s balanced on his haunches. At least now if he passes out, he won’t have far to fall. 

His shaking hands fumble through the motions of pulling out a cigarette and putting it between his teeth. He doesn’t even realise he’s doing it until it takes him three attempts to flick the lighter properly, nearly singeing his phalanges waiting for the end to smolder. He puffs greedily, letting the acrid taste of smoke chase away the far more unpleasant tang of human blood from his sinuses. 

_ Wait outside _ , Chara had told him, their small face oddly blank of annoyance or even pity.  _ You’re too soft for this. _

He can’t exactly argue, given how close he is to swooning. Chara had let their first cut make their argument for them, and Papyrus had fled like a coward the moment he’d seen all that bright, unnatural red welling up from the Messenger’s body.

_ Just get him here _ , Chara had ordered, their eyes over-bright and eager.  _ I’ll do all the work. _

Papyrus swears he can hear the muffled sound of shrieking through the door, but he knows it has to be his imagination. Chara has made sure their chosen torture room is perfectly sound-proof. It’s closed off and sealed with Papyrus safely on the other side. Papyrus examines his palms, but even the most enthusiastic splatter from Chara’s vengeful swing didn’t catch him on the way out. His hands are still clean.

Except he led that human to their death. He’s the reason they’re going to die tonight…and not easily. No, Chara’s gotten very good at drawing it out, their skill improving with each repetition, although each new victim they claim seems less deserving of their growing creativity, not more so. 

The first couple Papyrus barely noticed weighing on his conscience. He remembers seeing their faces in the throne room, their sneers and gleeful smiles amidst the dust on their blades and the screams of the Royal Family. They’d deserved to die.

But did their servants also deserve it? Their families? Their friends and acquaintances? Chara’s wrath only seems to be growing, not lessening, and Papyrus can’t figure out how to steer them away without risking open defiance…and given their current thirst for destruction he can’t imagine that will end well for him, or worse, for Blue. Chara doesn’t seem to care who’s suffering just so long as someone shares their pain.

At the same time, Papyrus knows he can’t do this again. His sleep is already haunted by those he’s helped condemn, even if his only role has been to lead them into Chara’s traps. Monsters aren’t made to carry this sort of weight, not without LOVE to deaden their compassion. The ache in his soul has become a constant companion. Some days, he can barely bring himself to roll out of bed. 

He can’t…he just can’t…

The words repeat like a mantra, a soothing background as he steadily works his way through the entirety of his pack of cigarettes. A choked, almost hysterical giggle slips out of him. He’s going to have to ask the monster in charge of supplies for another one. If Blue hears about it, he’s going to get scolded. The mundane, much less terrifying concern of facing Blue’s wrath gives him something to focus on while his soul tries to settle. 

It’s almost morning before Sans finds him, the small skeleton still dressed in the rags that mean he must have been somewhere on the outskirts of the city beforehand. How he’d known to come back was a secret Papyrus will probably never discover the answer to. 

“I didn’t think there’d be another one so soon,” Sans says by way of greeting, somehow managing to sound calm – casual, even. Papyrus hasn’t bothered to uncurl himself, hasn’t moved in hours except for the automatic repetitions of lighting one cigarette after another. The dirty pile of ash and butts between his feet probably isn’t a very reassuring sight, but Sans clasps Papyrus reassuringly on the shoulder and gently asks, “Are you ready?”

Another near-hysterical sound threatens to escape Papyrus again. Even without lungs and a proper esophagus, the back of his throat feels scorched and tight from all the smoking. His mouth is uncomfortably dry. He is in no way ready to face Chara.

But Sans had made him promise, and he’s yet another person Papyrus can’t say no to. Papyrus forces a nod, feeling slightly light-headed from all the nicotine, but at least now he feels focused enough to stand without the world giving way around him. He doesn’t bother to knock. Chara wouldn’t hear him with the sound-proofing anyway. He just turns the handle and braces himself to step inside, giving Sans just enough room to follow behind him.

Thankfully, it’s been long enough that Chara’s finished, though Papyrus thinks he should hate himself a little that it comes as a relief. The body of the Messenger is nothing more than a block of butchered meat on the table that Papyrus does his best to avoid looking at. Looking at Chara themselves isn’t much safer though. Their clothes are dyed a darker shade of red, dried and clotted in places whilst their hands are still bright with fresh gore. 

“You’re back,” Chara remarks, not sounding surprised or disturbed by the intrusion. Their focus is on the knife in their hands, slick fingers tracing its honed edge. “Hi Sans. I wasn’t expecting you until next week. Did something happen?”

“Yeah, looks like it did,” Sans remarks mildly, stepping forward, giving Papyrus leeway to hide behind him. He really doesn’t want to be here, but he did tell Sans they would do it together. “You’ve been busy, huh, kid?”

Chara giggles. It’s not a pleasant or cheerful sound. “Oh I have. Is that a problem?”

“Maybe not yet,” Sans says, managing to keep his voice remarkably even despite the horror on the table. Papyrus’s non-existent stomach rolls, and he’s unspeakably grateful he can’t taste or smell anything except the aftermath of his smoking binge. “But if you keep going the way you are now…Kid, this isn’t going to end well for you.”

Their answer is another manic, broken laugh, the sound jarring and magnified by the close walls of the torture room. Somewhere in that sound is the voice of a child who lost their loving family and has no idea how to cope with it. Papyrus feels his resolve hardening, hands curling into fists. “Chara, stop it!”

The laughter stops mid-syllable, like someone’s pressed stop on a disturbing recording. “I can’t. It’s not finished yet. Asriel…Asriel isn’t satisfied.”

They place a bloody hand over their chest, looking solemn and pensive. Sans looks back at Papyrus, exchanging a startled look. Chara has spoken very little of their adoptive brother since the attack, but those rare mentions are always framed as if the former prince is still alive somehow, or at least aware of what’s going on. He’s not sure what would be more disturbing; if that were true, or if it was just a figment of Chara’s already questionable sanity. 

“Monsters are made of love, not LOVE, kid,” Sans tells them gently. “I don’t think any amount of killing would make the Prince happy.”

Chara’s face screws up in ugly scorn. “How would you know? You never knew him.”

“But I did,” Papyrus says softly, arms instinctively wrapped around himself. “And I don’t think he’d want this.”

Chara’s eyes stare at the meat on the table, wide and sightless. Their bloody hands claw mindlessly at their sleeves, their teeth bared in a fanged scowl that would have made their boss-monster family proud. “He wanted monsters to be free. Monsters can’t be free while humans live…so humans have to die.”

Papyrus wants badly to argue that point – no one has to die! – but Sans nudges him discreetly and he bites his tongue.

“Even if that were the case,” Sans begins carefully, “killing one human at a time isn’t really going to change things. It’s messy, and risky, and judging from that look on your face, it’s not as satisfying as you want it to be, huh?”

Papyrus has no idea how Sans can tell, but his words seem to strike a chord with Chara. Their gaze jerks back from infinity, turning to focus on the small skeleton instead. Their silence seems to be tacit permission to continue, so Sans goes on, “There’s other things you can do – things that would make a bigger difference to setting monsters free. Sure, you might have to give up your fingerpainting for a while, but it’d be worth it in the long run.”

Chara looks down at their bloody hands, considering. “What kind of things?”

“I have ideas. Plans. Information. I was just putting together something for you when, uh. I got called back unexpectedly.” Sans gives the room a pointed look. “If you can just wait a bit longer, I promise it’ll be worth your while…but if you keep doing things like this, I gotta spend all my time putting out fires and making sure no one comes looking for their lost messengers. It makes it kinda hard to get anything done.”

“So you want me to stop.” It’s a statement rather than a question. Papyrus feels his hackles going up at Chara’s blunt tone, but Sans still looks placidly unaffected. His composure is unreal. Papyrus almost feels superfluous, all his concentration going towards making sure his legs don’t give out from under him, but Sans said his presence would be integral to getting Chara to listen and against all odds, it seems to be working.

There’s a dangerous pause while Sans carefully considers his answer before deliberately saying, “I want monsters to go free…however that has to happen.”

_ However that has to happen _ …just another way of saying the ends justifies the means; a concept Papyrus is already painfully familiar with. It means Sans won’t stop Chara – or rather, he can’t, just like Papyrus can’t. A soul like theirs has too much determination. The best they can do is try to guide Chara a little, and keep the destruction to a minimum. 

And Papyrus knows Chara well enough not to expect a straight agreement out of them, and he isn’t disappointed. Chara negligently waves them off as if shooing insects from their prized corpse, which still seems to be holding most of their attention. “I’ll think about it, I guess. Now, shouldn’t you be getting back?”

That’s a blatant dismissal if Papyrus has ever heard one. At least Chara doesn’t seem angry at Sans’s offer, though Papyrus can’t tell if they’re seriously considering it at all. He turns to open the door for both of them, only to be interrupted. 

“Not you, Paps. Stay and talk with me a minute.”

Papyrus blanches, throwing a helpless glance at Sans. The smaller skeleton’s expression remains fixed, but there’s a tightness around the eye-sockets that suggest he’s worried despite the front he’s putting up. Papyrus is sorely tempted to beg with his own eyes, knowing Sans might intervene to save him from a solo interrogation, but doing so might risk Chara’s temper and Papyrus knows they’ve pushed that far enough for one night. Chara might seem pleasant on the surface, but he knows them well enough to detect something amiss beneath the surface of their careless attitude. 

“Sure,” Papyrus agrees, bravely shooing Sans out into the hall and closing the door behind the smaller skeleton before he can think better of it. He turns, and faced with Chara’s brightly smiling visage, his bones given an unintentional rattle that he tries to cover with a smooth, cajoling smile. “What did you want to talk about?”

He manages the words without stuttering, and is absurdly proud of himself.

Chara blithely hops up to sit on the table holding the remains of their butchered victim. Papyrus doesn’t manage to hide his wince, wondering how they can be so nonchalant about their back resting up against a corpse. He’s so distracted he almost misses the playful crook of their finger as they beckon him closer. 

Papyrus swallows dryly, taking a hesitant step closer. He knows they’ve probably realised he hasn’t stepped a foot further into the room than he’s needed to. Their tinkling laugh just confirms it.

“So soft,” Chara mocks, beckoning again, forcing Papyrus to take another unwilling step forward. “And now you’re all worked up about meaningless lives like this one.”

Their small fist smacks the chest of the corpse with a disturbing squelch of sound. Papyrus’s strained smile turns into more of a grimace. “Chara-”

“Did it really matter so much to you-” Chara begins, reaching out and just barely managing to catch the edge of Papyrus’s sleeve with their bloody fingers. They use it to reel him in closer, “-that you had to team up with Sans against me?”

“I was worried about you,” he says, and absurdly, it’s true. He’s thrown his chips in with Chara right from the beginning. He’s always known what they are, what they’re capable of…but letting them kill without restraint is turning them into something different. The LOVE in Chara’s already mutated soul is terrifying; he can’t imagine letting it grow any worse than it already is. He doesn’t want to think about Chara not being  _ Chara  _ any more, even though some days it’s hard to tell where the seam is between their reckless abandon and the almost suicidal viciousness Asriel’s death conceived in them.

Because more so than the murders, what worries him is how little Chara seems to care about getting caught. As dumb as they are, humans won’t turn a blind eye to one of their own going on a murder spree. Eventually Chara’s going to kill someone important enough to get noticed, and when that happens, the whole Household is screwed. 

He can’t afford that, so he can’t afford to refuse as Chara pulls him closer. Sitting on the table, they’re still not quite at his eye level after his latest growth spurt. This seems to displease them, a small scowl forming on their features. They reach up as if to tug him down to a more equitable height, and he’s already bending to oblige and not at all prepared for the way they hook their fingers right into his eye-socket and pull, eliciting a strangled squawk of horror. The messenger’s blood on their fingers hasn’t quite dried, and the feel of foreign material smearing on the inside of his skull is absolutely revolting.

“I can’t stop, you know,” Chara confides mildly, sounding unperturbed as Papyrus chokes on disgust, torn between resisting and staying perfectly still so as not to spark a more dangerous retaliation. There’s something tightly restrained and predatory in Chara’s movements, making him all too aware of how easily their small human hands could break his brittle bones. “This is what I am. This is what they  _ made  _ me.”

Blinded in one socket, it takes him a moment to be able to focus on their face to try and figure out what they’re really saying behind those tight, unexpectedly earnest words. Chara isn’t trying to make excuses, they’re just speaking the truth…but not a truth they’re pleased by, if their unsteady grip and claw-like fingers are to be trusted. 

“And it gets easier every time I do it, but the need doesn’t go away. Not for long,” Chara says, the words almost like a sigh; like it costs them something to say it even as they drive their fingers deeper into Papyrus’s eye-socket. It’s not exactly painful, though it easily could be if that was their intent. So Chara’s not…mad, not at him and Sans, but some part of them is still upset.

Probably because they know Sans is right. They need to stop.

With the killing, at least, but Papyrus has watched Chara long enough to realise that as much as they strived for the death of their enemies, they were never satisfied by the end result.

But they had looked so happy in every moment before that, when their victim was still alive and suffering. Perhaps they hadn’t realised that part yet. 

“Chara,” Papyrus begins unevenly, trying desperately not to think about blood in his socket or the way Chara is smearing it over his cheek, painting the bone a gory shade of red. Going against every screaming instinct telling him to pull away, to scrub furiously at his violated eye, he forces himself to instead lean forward, slipping down to his knees. The change in position gives them better reach, and he feels their fingers going in deep, tangling through the magic inside his skull. It’s a bizarre, uncomfortable sensation, but he persists, looking up into Chara’s bewildered face. “Is this…helping?”

He watches them consider it. Their fingers wriggle inside his skull, teasing the not-quite-empty space. Something about their intent starts to shift, and the discomfort of the intrusion starts to morph into something more sincerely painful. It stabs through his skull, like those small fingers are knives slowly sawing into his socket, but at the first sound of a whimper he can’t hold back Chara suddenly relents, pulling their hand back entirely. 

“A little,” they confess, sounding almost surprised by it, examining their fingers with newfound interest before looking down at Papyrus’s expression. They carefully touch his cheek, poking him right below his bloodstained socket. “You look good like that.” 

Papyrus lets out a ragged, disbelieving laugh, but already the ghost of an idea is starting to form. Chara doesn’t need people to kill. They just need people to hurt. He can find a way to work that somehow, to give them an outlet so they don’t go too far while Sans finds other ways to distract them for the long term. He can do it. Chara listens to him…sort of. It’s the best solution for everyone.

And if he can’t find anyone else…well, he can always stand-in himself until he can find an alternative. Surely it won’t be that bad.


End file.
